I was going to select a few choice quotes but it’s a short article so I’ve actually included most of it here! Apparently if you employ a nanny or au pair before your child’s first birthday you are setting them up to cheat on their wife (if they are a boy, and assuming they are heterosexual!) or fill their “vacuum of need” with “drink, drugs, sex or money” if they’re a girl.

“It introduces him to the concept of The Other Woman,” said Dr Friedman who is 85.

“It creates a division in his mind between the woman he knows to be his natural mother and the woman with whom he has real hands-on relationship: the woman who bathes him and takes him to the park, and with whom he feels completely at one.

“As a result, he grows up with the idea that although he will one day go through all the social and sexual formalities of marriage, he will have at the back of his mind the notion of this other woman, who not only knows, but caters for, all his needs.”

Baby girls are also not immune, he claims. If they have a nanny or au pair they are filled with a “vacuum of need” inside them which they fill in a variety of ways such as drink, drugs, sex or money.

He said that his comments would not be popular with women who feel they have a right to have a career and social life while bringing up their baby.

But that the baby has a right too, he said – the right to have a relationship with a mother who is “100 per cent connected”.

He said the solution was not to employ a nanny or au pair until after the baby’s first birthday.

Real winner, this bloke! And someone paid him to write a book about this toss?

“I am absolutely livid,” fumed my friend. A headhunter, she had just been told that a woman she had placed with a top FTSE company had taken a year’s maternity leave, come back, begged for a promotion (telling the HR department threateningly that she didn’t want to be ruled out just because she had a small child), got the promotion and two months into her new job announced she was pregnant again and would be taking another year off. The HR department boss was unhappy but could do nothing. The woman was within her legal rights.

“It just takes the piss,” said my friend. “Behaving like that just makes it much more difficult for the rest of us.”

My friend is not a dinosaur, she is a mid-thirties working mother who recruits men and women into senior jobs all over industry: “Every time a woman does that, it makes it that much harder for me to put forward a female the next time. Women who abuse the system give all of us a bad name.”

So am I reading this right? Apparently women who dare to want to have children and take the maternity leave they’re legally entitled to, are to blame for the glass ceiling. You hear that, ladies? You’re not just to blame for the fall of society and the state of the youth of today, but for sexism within employment as well. Wonderful.

The Mirror tells us of a mother who is facing having her baby taken away from her after it is born. Yes, that’s right, the mother isn’t even a proper mother yet and already social workers have decided that she is unable to properly care for the child. Why? Because she has learning disabilities. You know what? So do I. Learning disabilities do not mean someone is unable to care for a child. They mean that someone needs assistance with learning, not that they’re unable to learn.

The fact that social workers have pre-determined that a mother-to-be isn’t qualified to be a mother because of her disability smacks of the legacy of eugenics. Eugenics was the late 19th, early 20th Century movement that was based on an interpretation of Darwinism to “improve the races”. One of the things that resulted from this movement was the forced sterilisation of people, mostly women, who were regarded as “imbeciles” on the theory that imbeciles beget imbeciles. Interestingly, imbeciles were only found among those that society had deemed as unworthy, such as working-class prostitutes or children in orphanages. In the famous case of Buck v Bell, the US Supreme Court upheld the sterilisation of a woman who excelled in school on the grounds that she was an imbecile (and not at all because she was the daughter of a prostitute). While eugenics lost favour thanks to the Nazis showing how eugenics could be carried out with murderous precision (It’s worth remembering that the first victims of Nazi extermination policies were in mental hospitals), its legacy lived on, especially in the US where sterilisations continued into the 1970s.

But now we’ve advanced so far! No one is saying this woman should be sterilised, just that she shouldn’t be given a chance to be a mother. Because clearly people with disabilities are incompetent mothers. They can’t possibly have partners or family members to assist them if they do need assistance. And, social workers can’t assist either. They’re too busy taking away the child and blaming the mother.

Cristina Odone would like you to know that “real women” don’t want to work full-time. “Real women” find primary fulfilment as mothers. But she’s “not having a pop at working mothers”. She’s just saying they’re not real women.

Now, there’s something to (the reports of) her conclusions: yes, parents should have more freedom to choose to work outside the home or not; we should value parenting; economic contributions are not the only kind of contributions. But the big fat mother-blaming fail comes in the fact that this is all about mothers, nary a mention of the possibility that men could be fulfilled as at-home parents, and her choice of the term “real women”. Fuck you, Cristina Odone, you anti-feminist, anti-secularist, ranting pillock.

For a day I sat with the detectives — all male, bar one — at the headquarters of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre in London, as they trawled through the hundreds of thousands of images, videos and transcripts of online chat …

The perpetrators are overwhelmingly Western white males, and the victims are mostly female. … But there is something else that catches your eye in the corner of the frame: the ignorance of women.

So there we have it. It’s our ignorance that gets our children abused online. It’s not, you know, the people that do it. Nope. Not them. I mean, they can’t help it, can they?

When one man, posing as a teenager on a social networking site, pressured a schoolgirl to lift her shirt for him, you saw her checking her back. While sitting at the family computer in the middle-class living room, her mother kept walking in and out, and the girl picked the moment when her mum’s back was, literally, turned.

And “middle class living room“? Hey, be careful mothers with a Volvo parked out front – it can happen to you, it’s not just the working classes! Quick! Step away from polishing the John Lewis mahogany table and go and watch your daughter immediately!

In another case the pink bedroom where a male relative filmed the abuse — police tracked thousands of images for six years before they saved this girl — could not have been decorated by anyone other than an indulgent mother, so feminine and fond was the provision of pink cushions and knick-knacks.

Another man, to prove to his online friends that he had access to a baby to abuse, posted online a family snap he took of his daughter’s first birthday. There is his baby in their shiny kitchen, her unwitting mother staring at the camera with a smile full of love.

It’s the mother’s fault she didn’t suspect her partner of abusing their child? It’s her fault for saying “cheese” when he took a snap for the family album? She should have been looking with eyes of suspicion, like we should all look at our partners, if they’re male, because it’s our duty to suspect them of being paedophiles? (And, what is with Ms R’s obsession with furnishings – “shiny kitchen”? Because abuse normally happens in drab, working class kitchens? What?)

Of course female paedophiles exist — in less than 5 per cent of cases. And yes, the internet’s special talent is to bring together people with rare predilections, horribly so for Vanessa George and Angela Allen. But don’t let the shock of the uncommon blind you to who is a more likely threat to your child. Don’t be the woman in the corner of the room, back turned.

Ah, but be careful, lest you spend too long suspecting the men in your life. Because then it’ll be your fault for being a man-hater, too.

The abusers, of course, don’t have any responsibility for what they’ve done. No, it’s the mothers.

Story link here, linked to This Is Bristol because I refuse to link to The Sun.

A frightened Bristol mum who refused to give evidence against her partner was locked up while he was released.

Tina Connors is so scared of her partner that she was prepared to go to jail instead of giving evidence against him – and spent three hours in the cells for failing to testify.

Her partner Jerry faced trial for ramming her car as she fled to Bristol from him with their three children, threatening her, and later smashing up the car before torching it.

Yes friends, you read that correctly. This woman has already had to deal with the father of her children attempting to force her off the road while the children were in the car before he smashed up and set fire to the car and because she was too scared of him to testify in court, SHE was locked up while HE got to walk free from court. Because of course, it’s much better for the children to see Daddy let off with trying to kill them and Mummy locked up for being a victim. There’s a beautiful victim-blaming quote from the Judge (Judge Mark Horton)

You were more frightened of your husband than this court, which could send you to prison for two years. That tells me how frightened you were.

“If something now happens there’s only one person you can blame. The legal system of this country has tried to help you and you have spurned it.

FYI, the conviction rate for domestic violence last year was 6.4%. Not exactly inspiring for any woman who wants to live a life free from fear. This woman fought to protect her children, made a complaint to the police about her abusive, violent partner and followed it through only for her to be jailed because she should just get over being scared.